


Everything washes up on Sakaar eventually

by redroslin



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Crossover, F/F, For both canons! I swear!, Kara's missing two months, Pluto is a planet and I will hear no argument, Sakaar (Marvel), Violent drunken sisters from another mister, Warning for self-destructive thinking bordering on suicidal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:51:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redroslin/pseuds/redroslin
Summary: The ship was a piece of shit, and the woman inside was the spitting image of Brunnhilde's long-dead love.





	Everything washes up on Sakaar eventually

**Author's Note:**

> This is the plot bunny that wouldn't die. Completely unrelated to my [WITSverse](https://archiveofourown.org/series/781908), because that version of Kara has _more than enough going on_ and does not need to sleep with Brunnhilde right now. But this one does.

She found the piece-of-shit little ship on a really bad day--the kind of day when everything hurt and she wished she could crawl into a bottle and actually die inside it, because what was the point anyway. (So, a lot like most other days.)

The wreckage hardly deserved to be called a ship at all--a bunch of trash soldered together, barely enough to hold up against vacuum and completely worthless now that it'd burned up and crashed. Brunnhilde was going to leave it for scavengers less fastidious than her to pick over, had almost walked right past the damn thing, when movement inside the cockpit caught her eye.

No one could have survived the disaster this ship had been through. Still, something was moving in there, so she stuck the fingers of one gloved hand through the crack that zigzagged its way across the canopy and pried it open.

It took her more than a few attempts--the little piece of shit was tougher than it looked--before she was able to peel the canopy up and find out what was under it.

"What the--"

She must be seeing things. That flaxen hair, the cheekbones, the way the light hit that beloved and infinitely stubborn jaw... all somehow, inexplicably, whole and hale inside a ship that looked like it had gone three rounds with Odin's lightning. (That it had lost went without saying, naturally.)

The woman twitched and her eyes flicked open--and they were _her_ eyes, those bright hazel eyes that Brunnhilde knew better than she knew her own name.

"Fuck, no," Brunnhilde said, backing away. "Fuck you."

"Well, that's frakking rude," the blonde said, and passed out again.

 

v/^

 

Everything washed up on Sakaar eventually, though it was anyone's guess whether that was a natural peculiarity of the planet, or something caused by the Grandmaster's fuckery in its gravitational field and with the loci of its dozen active gateways.

Brunnhilde didn't know and didn't care. The more trash washed up, the better hunting she'd find for the Grandmaster's arena, which meant money in her pocket and liquor in her hand.

Even if she were losing her mind, which she wasn't, that didn't change a thing. She picked up the woman--who turned out to be human and about as insubstantial as a feather--collected her reward, and went on her way.

 

^\v

 

If she passed the holding cells a few times a day, and kept an eye out for a flash of golden hair, no one needed to know--and it didn't mean anything.

And if she did a double take when she found herself up against the human in the Grandmaster's damned Contest of Champions, well, who could blame her. Cleaned up and dressed in normal garb, the stranger was breathtaking. And she _was_ a stranger; no matter that she looked enough like a dead woman to almost have been her twin.

The woman stood a hand shorter than Sieg, and had nothing on an Asgardian's muscle mass. Still, the resemblance was striking, like a moth caught in a mirror and trying to beat its way out.

The crowd roared as the Grandmaster announced them, "I give you... a new contender, the Starbuck... against your Champion: the Vengeful and Victorious... Valkyrie!" Brunnhilde stepped out of her holding room on the north side of the arena and the stranger glared across the sand.

The woman was no match for a Valkyrie, but she stood like a fighter and carried herself with confidence that said she'd won more battles than she'd ever lost. This might almost be fun, Brunnhilde mused--if only her opponent weren't so small, and so breakable.

Brunnhilde dodged the human's first few attacks and then popped her in the chin with careful precision when she went for a leg sweep. The woman's head snapped back and she went over like a doll.

The crowd was screaming for blood. Brunnhilde walked away.

The Valkyrie had killed a lot of people in Sakaar's arena. But not this one.

 

v/^

 

It wasn't like it would be with Thor, centuries later; he would draw her in because he was Asgardian--and not just any Asgardian, but her liege.

The woman drew her not because of who she was, but who she looked like--truly the most superficial of things--and also for the way she was lit from within, like one touched by the gods, like the Valkyrior in ages past. The rest of the galaxy might forget, but Brunnhilde, whether she willed or no, would remember what it meant to be godstouched until the day she got her final wish by battle or by bottle.

Something about the human was different from the Grandmaster's other gladiators, and she all but glowed with it. She'd tried to break out of confinement the day she was brought in, three times the following week, and again after her first fight. Escape attempts had been made before by contenders smarter, tougher, and more subtle than her, but by few so dogged.

That wasn't why Brunnhilde had the woman brought to the Champion's quarters two days after they faced off in the arena.

"--the frak are you taking me--oh, it's you," the blonde sneered as a servant escorted her through the door and into Brunnhilde's sitting room.

"You're welcome," Brunnhilde said.

"For what?"

Brunnhilde smirked. "For sparing your life in the Contest."

"After you put me there?"

Ah, so the stubborn chin and the fighter's stance spoke true. "What should I call you?"

The blonde put her hands on her hips and glared.

"I'd like to know your name," Brunnhilde said, sarcasm deceptively mild. "If that's not too much of an imposition."

 "You can call me Starbuck."

"Starbuck. Really."

"That's right. And if you want me to thank you, you can get me my viper back." She reached for the bottle on Brunnhilde's table and took a swig, maintaining eye contact through the maneuver. She couldn't have been expecting 120-proof Xandarian ale but she didn't flinch.

Brunnhilde raised an eyebrow. "Well, Starbuck, your viper--if by that you mean your flimsy little ship--has moved on to greener pastures."

"Whose greener pastures?"

"No one's," and she bit off an unvoiced insult as needlessly childish. "It's dead on the ground, looks like it's been through a trash fire. There's no salvaging a ship that fried."

"I want to see it."

"Of course you do." Brunnhilde rolled her eyes. "That's not going to happen. You're the Grandmaster's now, just like the rest of us."

"I'm no one's property," she spat, but under the bravado she looked young and scared, and Brunnhilde regretted--well, she regretted a lot of things.

Feeling tired and very, very old, she told Starbuck, "Well, try to make the best of it."

Starbuck sneered. "Frak you."

"If that's what you'd like," she said, a thoughtless deflection, but Starbuck stepped up into her personal space with a feral grin. "What are you--"

"You're going to regret giving me that invitation."

Brunnhilde narrowed her eyes; the other woman didn't back down, only grinned more widely up at her. She was fucking dangerous, this Starbuck; she was a firebrand; she was probably unhinged.

"Am I now." Brunnhilde didn't reach out, but neither she did she back away.

"Yes." There was a challenge in Starbuck's hazel eyes, too close, too familiar.

Brunnhilde could have moved. She didn't want to.

Finally, she asked, "And what makes you think someone like me has regrets?"

"We all have regrets," Starbuck said, and then she kissed her.

Kissing Starbuck was nothing like kissing Sieg--but, sword and song, it was good. She kissed like she fought, smart and fierce and devil-may-care, and before she'd thought it through Brunnhilde had backed her toward the bedroom and was pushing her down onto the bed.

"Nice digs," Starbuck said, rutting against her and looking up into the canopy of the four-poster bed.

"If you're critiquing my decor, I must be doing something  wrong," Brunnhilde told her, tearing at clothes to get her hands on Starbuck's skin. The favour was returned in kind, and in under a minute Brunnhilde found herself flat on her back while Starbuck's clever tongue stroked her expertly toward climax.

It was good. Sword and song, it was good.

 

^\v

 

She wasn't Siegrina, she wasn't anything like Sieg, but damn if Starbuck wasn't incredible on her own merit.

They traded off for what felt like hours, using fingers and tongues and ingenuity to get each other off in a dizzying tourney of one-upmanship.

After her eighth orgasm, when they lay in the sweaty, ruined remains of her sheets and Brunnhilde paused for a moment to catch her breath, she was startled when Starbuck mumbled something against her shoulder that might have been _care_ , or maybe _carrot_.

"Hmm?" she managed to respond as if she gave a fuck.

"My name. It's Kara," Starbuck said gruffly. "Kara Thrace."

"I'm Brunnhilde."

"Just Brunnhilde?"

"Brunnhilde of the Valkyrior."

"Well, Brunnhilde of the Valkyrior. You should know that I'm going to frak you over and escape from this psychedelic prison planet. And we're never doing this again."

She laughed, and was surprised to hear herself laugh. "Definitely not."

 

v/^

 

They did it again.

 

^\v

 

There wasn't much else to do on Sakaar. When you got right down to it, the Grandmaster's games were entertaining to no one but the man himself, unless you were winning; and even winning paled after a few centuries, as Brunnhilde had discovered.

She could step into the ring and take out anyone who chose to compete against her, but what was the point? She'd long since stopped caring, if she ever had, and she wasn't about to start now just because Kara was turning out to be a regular visitor in her bed. She told herself she missed the last century's parade of one-night stands, but she didn't. This was nice. This was easy.

They weren't friends, exactly, but they weren't not-friends either, and that was almost the weirdest part of the arrangement. They'd get drunk together and terrorize the other gladiators, then slip back to Brunnhilde's rooms and go at each other like wild animals with something to prove. Whatever it was, though, seemed to keep getting lost somewhere between the bed linens and the dark, and Brunnhilde couldn't swear to that being a bad thing.

Everything still hurt. She didn't stop drinking or going out hunting for strays, but she did go less often. Once or twice, she imagined bringing Kara with her, then thought better of it. Kara would want to see her precious _viper_ , or she'd pull something self-destructive and idiotic and probably get them both in over their heads (she did keep trying to escape, after all). Brunnhilde didn't have the will to face it.

 

v/^

 

The night Kara started calling her _Brunn_ was also the night she first mentioned Sam ("No one's ever fingered me that deep 'cept Sam," she'd sighed contently, rolling over and into sleep), and one or the other left a chill creeping down Brunnhilde's spine well into the next evening. She took her noon meal alone, went out after derelicts, pocketed her pay and retreated to her rooms to dine alone again, just like she used to.

Exactly like she used to.

She'd built a life for herself here. She knew who she was. She knew what this was.

But Kara had a home and people that she missed and wanted to return to.

"Tell me about Sam," Brunnhilde said the next night, when they were half a bottle in and Kara was starting to eye her like she might be ready to take things to the bedroom.

Kara froze like a startled bilgesnipe. "Why do you want to know?"

"Curiosity," she drawled, stroking one hand up Kara's thigh toward the crease of her hip. "I want to know who you're comparing me to when you close your eyes."

Kara shuddered out a breath. "Fine. Okay." She looked up at Brunnhilde from under defiant lashes. "Sam's my husband."

"Husband. Huh. I wasn't expecting that."

A smile spread slowly across Kara's face, like the sun coming out on a winter's day in Jotunheim. "No one ever does."

"And he's good to you, your Sam?"

"Yes. I'm not always so good to him, but he's--Sam is--"

"That's all right," Brunnhilde said, licking her way into Kara's mouth and pinning her to her chair. She pulled back just far enough to breathe, "It'd be hard for anyone to deserve you if you were."

"You're frakking insane, Brunn," Kara told her.

Brunnhilde smiled and didn't bother telling her that the usual diminutive was _Hilda_. "Takes one to know one."

 

^\v

 

She managed to tease out enough pieces of Kara's past to get a picture of the world she hailed from--claustrophobic and strange, the survivors of a deadly genocide on the run in a fleet of disintegrating ships, never sure who in their midst might turn out to be a sleeper agent or a traitor. It sounded hard, and cold, and desperate. All descriptors Brunnhilde knew well.

Kara had apparently flown her tiny trash ship into a religious metaphor--probably one of the Grandmaster's hundreds of inactive nexus loci, once you cut through the mystic mumbo-jumbo--and ended up here.

"You're crazy," Brunnhilde told her when she'd finally heard enough to make sense of the story. "You're insane."

"I might be crazy, Brunn, but it hasn't killed me yet," she said smugly, then seemed to reconsider. "Unless this is the afterlife? I never considered that. Maybe I should be worried about--"

"Not any afterlife I'm familiar with, and I'm the expert on several," Brunnhilde informed her dryly.

"Good to know?"

"Best not to ask."

The cocky grin made its reappearance. " _Less talk, more orgasms_ was always my motto anyway."

 

v/^

 

They were talking about Earth, later--fabled Earth, land of milk and plenty, where Kara's thirteen tribes were supposed to end up, according to her mystic whatever--and Kara's laugh rang out, loud and sure, and it was all too much for words and Brunnhilde admitted, "You remind me of someone."

"Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?"

"Yes."

Kara tried to out-stare her, but gave up almost immediately. "Fine. Don't tell me anything."

"All right, I won't."

"Frak you."

Brunnhilde shrugged. "If you must."

 

^\v

 

She didn't mean to care, but apparently it was much too late, because she found herself thinking.

She looked into the star charts first, to make sure she had something worth the effort. Earth wouldn't be the Eden Kara's people expected, but it must exist; and if it existed, the Grandmaster's computers would know where.

They did. The charts were easy to find, and a copy of the data was in her pocket in minutes, and she supposed she really was going to do this damn fool thing.

 

v/^

 

"I have something to show you," she told Kara, weeks later, and two days after her preparations were complete.

"Should I be worried?" Kara joked. "The last time anybody used that line on me, I nearly wound up stealing someone's kid."

"Eugh, no," she told her. "Why would you--never mind, I don't want to know."

"Probably better not to get into that mindfrak, yeah."

"You'll like this. Follow me."

The look on Kara's face when she came around the corner to the landing bay and caught sight of the viper was worth everything Brunnhilde had had to pay to make it happen.

"What--" Kara froze in the middle of the hangar walkway. "Brunn, I thought--but you said--"

Brunnhilde kissed her, and Kara tried to pick her up and spin her around in a circle but tripped on having forgotten, _again,_ how much heavier Asgardians were than humans, and once they had both finished laughing and kissing and grabbing at each other for balance they'd attracted more than a small audience.

"I'd say we should take this back to your room, if I didn't know what a filthy exhibitionist you are," Kara muttered in her ear, setting off another round of giggles and groping.

"All right, so tell me how you did this," Kara finally insisted. "And I need to touch that viper right now to make sure she's real."

"She's real. And she's yours."

Kara stroked the hull in wonder. "I thought you said she was burned to a crisp? How'd you pull this off?"

"That's not the same trash ship. It's a brand new replica, straight off the Grandmaster's machine duplication lines."

"Does she fly?" She was halfway up the ladder to the cockpit before the words left her mouth, joy in every syllable.

"She'll fly."

Leaping into the pilot's seat, she laughed in delight. "That's all I care about."

"I knew it," Brunnhilde teased. "Only after me for my secret ability to manufacture vipers."

Kara froze, looking down at Brunnhilde in chagrin.

"What did you have to give him to get me a viper?" she demanded, sliding back down the side of the ship and landing in front of her. "What did you do, Brunn?"

"Nothing that wasn't mine to give."

Kara's eyes narrowed. "We're going to talk about this."

Brunnhilde sighed, but only on the inside. "I knew we were."

 

^\v

 

It hadn't been so much, really.

She had no use for money, after centuries in one place with no interest in buying much of anything but booze. That hadn't stopped her from leveraging the prestige of two thousand years as the Grandmaster's Champion to amass a tidy sum in credits. Glory grew stale, but cash lasted forever. She'd brought hundreds of people to the arena, and defeated thousands, and become a moderately wealthy woman in the process.

Money didn't make you hate yourself less, but it sure was something to do to pass the time.

The Grandmaster wasn't surprised when she asked to buy one of his arena fighters--flesh was cheap on Sakaar, and no one was without sin. But he was taken aback when she started haggling for half a day's use of his ship fabricators.

"Planning on leaving me, Champion?" he teased, spinning one of those annoying ball-bearing toys that had become all the rage recently. "And you seemed so happy here!"

 _Happy._ She snorted, then scowled at him. "I'm not going anywhere."

"And why would you, when you can have all this?" His gesture seemed to include not only Sakaar but himself and his fidget spinner. She suppressed both the face she wanted to make and the urge to smash the damn thing.

"I can't even imagine," she told him, dry as bone.

"Now why doesn't that picture add up with your desire to rent my ship factory for a day?"

"Half a day. And it adds up just fine: the ship's not for me."

"Hmmmmm," he mused, drawing it out. "And if I were to say no?"

She shrugged laconically.

"You'll use it anyway and blow something up on your way out?"

"Hard to say. Anything's possible."

He laughed. "Oh, you," he said fondly, flicking the fidget spinner at her. It sailed past her ear in a whir of hot pink and teal before colliding dramatically with a decorative column. "Fine, fine. Have at, only don't tell me which of my arena faves you're setting loose. Is it Athos? Tell me it isn't that idiot Ivan?"

"No," she said, "it's neither of them."

"Go on, now," he flapped a hand dismissively. "Twelve million credits and we'll call it even."

She grinned. "Twelve thousand."

And they were off.

 

v/^

 

"I shouldn't let you do this for me," Kara said once she'd heard her out. "But I need to get back to the fleet. They're out there waiting for me to tell them how to find Earth, and I don't even--"

Brunnhilde interrupted her with a lazy grin. "I can help with that, too."

She pulled up the star maps she'd copied from the Grandmaster's database.

"Have a look." In the corner of the first chart, a nine-planet system had been highlighted, with the third planet marked _EARTH_. She'd even found full video of Earth, sprawling blue below some explorer's ship cam, and loaded all of it to a folder with the charts.

"Frak, Brunn, I can't believe this," Kara said. "This is--I'd say it's too much, but I'd be lying, it's just enough. But why the frak would you--"

"Don't ask, and I won't have to lie to you," Brunnhilde said, and kissed her before pulling back to look into those eyes that were so much like Sieg's. "I don't want to lie about this."

Kara nodded. "I won't ever forget it," she swore. "If you need anything, if there's ever anything I can do for you--"

"We're never going to see each other again," Brunnhilde pointed out, "but I appreciate the sentiment."

"You never know," Kara said, turning back to the star maps. "The galaxy seems a lot smaller to me now."

Which wouldn't matter in fifty years or so, when Kara's mayfly life ended and Brunnhilde was still on Sakaar. Brunnhilde shrugged. "There's just one problem: the maps can't be transferred to your viper. The tech isn't compatible."

"That's all right," Kara tapped the side of her head, "I've got it all up here."

"You're sure you'll remember? Going through the Nightmare Gate can really fuck a person up."

"I'll be fine." She grinned, and Brunnhilde found herself distracted,  and by the time they came up for air Kara's hypothetical perfect memory for maps was the last thing on her mind.

 

^\v

 

It had been easy to set it all in motion. It was hard to see her off.

"Come with me," Kara said, stupidly, impossibly, as she gathered up her newly fabricated Colonial gear and got ready to climb into the viper. "We could use you, where I come from."

"Your viper doesn't seat two."

"As if you couldn't get your hands on another ship."

Brunnhilde thought of Asgard and of Kara's dead world, then of Kara's husband Sam, and finally of Sieg, without whom none of it mattered.

"I don't think I'd belong in your world," she said, lightly, "any better than you belong here."

"What makes you think _I do_?"

She laughed, as Kara'd intended, and pulled her close to kiss her for the last time. She ruffled Kara's flaxen hair and breathed in the scent of her for a moment. Then she watched as Kara suited up, climbed into her viper, and took off.

Kara was on a quest to save her people from annihilation--the kind of battle you could only fight, and lose, once.

"Safe travels, Starbuck," she whispered to herself as the viper disappeared into the hazy morning sky. She wouldn't see the Gate from here, but she watched anyway. "I'll see you in Valhalla, shield sister."


End file.
